Weve finally emerged from the season in which Americans were asked by the pollsters and politicians: Are you better off today than you were four years ago? But sometimes its important to contemplate the question of progress from a longer view: How are we doing on the scale of a generation?

To answer that question, take this brief quiz.

Over the past two decades, what have the U.S. trends been for the following important measures of social health: high school dropout rates, college enrollment, juvenile crime, drunken driving, traffic deaths, infant mortality, life expectancy, per capita gasoline consumption, workplace injuries, air pollution, divorce, male-female wage equality, charitable giving, voter turnout, per capita GDP and teen pregnancy?

The answer for all of them is the same: The trend is positive. Almost all those varied metrics of social wellness have improved by more than 20% over the past two decades. And thats not counting the myriad small wonders of modern medicine that have improved our quality of life as well as our longevity: the anti-depressants and insulin pumps and quadruple bypasses.

Hee hee...these cretins actually believe ‘science’ and ‘medicine’ advancements will be focused on prolonging their miserable worthless, non-contributing lives, don’t they? At present with the re-election of their Messiah, they are living a fool’s dream that is at best a couple of weeks deep with regard to the support structure that continues their oblivious existence. It’s a pity they’ll be the first to get ‘voted off the island’ in the death panel game.

Over the past two decades, what have the U.S. trends been for the following important measures of social health: high school dropout rates, college enrollment, juvenile crime, drunken driving, traffic deaths, infant mortality, life expectancy, per capita gasoline consumption, workplace injuries, air pollution, divorce, male-female wage equality, charitable giving, voter turnout, per capita GDP and teen pregnancy?

The answer for all of them is the same: The trend is positive.

It sounds like he may get his statistics from CNN.

4
posted on 11/24/2012 11:54:57 AM PST
by FlingWingFlyer
(Criminal defense lawyers won't have the Twinkie to kick around anymore.)

I don’t have stats off the top of my head, but this report is saying that teen pregnancy is down. Okay, maybe it is. However, we have in the last couple of generations completely institutionalized the concept of out of wedlock pregnancy and broken homes and single mothers and other ad hoc living arrangements.

It’s not PC to talk about how we are raising so many of our children in less than ideal circumstances nowadays. So while teen pregnancy may be down, far more of the kids being born are not being raised in the best circumstances, with both mother and father in the home.

I know I just made a number of value judgements which you aren’t supposed to do in these politically correct times. Flame away.

What about the trend towards people in their 20s having massive student debt and no useful job skills to show for four more years of doing nothing but letting someone else take care of them, yet still feel entitled to the fruits of others’ labor?

That’s a statistic that can be manipulated, especially if the percentage of population that are in their teens in the country is lower than in the past. I wouldn’t worry about what Minitrue has to say about it; they’re counting on people having voluntary “memory holes” . . . the Innerparty doesn’t need to work as hard.

Over the past two decades, what have the U.S. trends been for the following important measures of social health: high school dropout rates, college enrollment, juvenile crime, drunken driving, traffic deaths, infant mortality, life expectancy, per capita gasoline consumption, workplace injuries, air pollution, divorce, male-female wage equality, charitable giving, voter turnout, per capita GDP and teen pregnancy?

The answer for all of them is the same: The trend is positive.

It sounds like he may get his statistics from CNN. He left out voter fraud, class warfare, anti-Caucasionism, unemployment, taxes, DUIs, "missing" and murdered children, loss of freedoms and liberties, communism, no jobs for college graduates, loss of useful college degrees, autistic-acting children who are fixated on their cellphones, children without two parents, illegal immigration and anti-Christian bigotry.

11
posted on 11/24/2012 12:09:19 PM PST
by FlingWingFlyer
(Criminal defense lawyers won't have the Twinkie to kick around anymore.)

There is nothing positive about giving up freedom. Our generation is much less free than our parents. And we won't even recognize the next unless we and our children can band together to vote out the godless wannabe totalitarians. The barbarians are inside the gate.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. --Ronald Reagan

It breaks my heart every time I see or hear about broken homes and the kids involved. I really just want to strangle the so called adults.

I just cant understand how two people were in love enough to produce a child and now they can’t stand to live on the same planet with that person. Does the ex represent all the bad choices they have made?

Somehow, employment and wealth failed to make the author's list of important things.

It's worthwhile to remember that in the Fall of 2001, an earthquake of 6.X hit the San Fransisco area, and 3 people died (from heart attacks, but they were counted as caused by the earthquake.) A few days later, a slightly less powerful earthquake hit Iran, and 30,000 people died as a result, mostly because their mud hut crushed them when it fell down.

Moral of the story; there is an enormous social value in the existence of building codes and the accumulated wealth and social will to comply with those building codes.

A lesson lost of the morally bankrupt social engineers who fail to recognize that one true law exists in nature; the parasite must be smaller than the host. If there are no Sharks, there are no Pilot Fish.

27
posted on 11/24/2012 12:35:18 PM PST
by Bernard
('He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else' - Benjamin Franklin)

The word Minitrue appears in the seventh paragraph of the first chapter of that book.

The Ministry of TruthMinitrue, in Newspeakwas startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 meters into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACEFREEDOM IS SLAVERYIGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.

The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometer of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.

I always wondered what a failure of technology would have done to the Partys power. But Orwell never went there . . .

As the majority white middle class population decreases, the social statistics are only going to get worse and worse.
Had boomers kept the American cultural melting pot in institutions and culture, that would be different.

But we permitted liberals to ghettoize minority and white youth with the socialist slogan “don’t act white.” We permitted them to feminize and drug males. Well then, expect statistics to match the ghetto culture that has been imposed upon American children.

Despite the propaganda of the LeftSM, the French millenials have experienced the lie that "The trend is positive" "from a longer view" and are ready to revolt. I only hope our millenials soon discover the error of their ways. But it's a tough battle to overcome the indoctrination by public schools, Hollywood 'culture', academia, and the LeftSM.

Public service: for those wanting a perhaps easier way to use html tags without actually learning the code this link might be useful.

“sure you can lower high school drop out rates when the curriculum is dumbed down and students with failing grades are still issued diplomas”
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Of course and even more so when college graduates are incapable of passing a tenth grade final exam from a public school circa 1960. I am serious when I write this, it is no joke, we would have a real need for only a tiny percentage of the current number of university classrooms if K-12 education was anything like what it used to be.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XScQCaLmtAw

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